method. At Solesby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of
Cliff House, together with her own burning sense of inferiority and
disadvantage, had troubled her no more. She was well taught there, and
developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly
broken in to all social proprieties. But it was not her lessons or her
dancing masters that she remembered. She had made for herself agitations
at Cliff House, but what were they as compared to the agitations of
Solesby! Life there had been one long Wertherish romance in which there
were few incidents, only feelings, which were themselves events. It
contained humiliations and pleasures, but they had been all matters of
spiritual relation, connected with one figure only--the figure of her
schoolmistress, Miss Pemberton; and with one emotion only--a passion, an
adoration, akin to that she had lavished on the Ellertons, but now much
more expressive and mature. A tall slender woman with brown,
grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our
grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot
behind--the face of a saint, an enthusiast--eyes overflowing with
feeling above a thin firm mouth--the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet
sweet also: this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella's
heart. What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in
connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself
through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a
figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?--for Miss
Pemberton, who slept little and read late, never went to rest without
softly going the rounds of her pupils' rooms. What storms of contest,
mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions, first of
combat, then of reconciliation to which they led! What a strange
development on the pupil's side of a certain histrionic gift, a turn for
imaginative intrigue, for endless small contrivances such as might rouse
or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling! What agitated moments